Wicked Prey (37 page)

“This shit’s better than coke,” Whitcomb said. “It’s like somebody sticks a fuckin’ knife in your brain.”

George bobbed his head and said, “Party on, men,” and he was gone. George was a teetotaler.

* * *

CRANK—ENOUGH OF IT—affected Whitcomb the way a paddle affects a Ping-Pong ball. They loaded the GE crank pipe with a spoon of the stuff, melted it down with a Bic lighter, watched it bubble and then begin to smoke. Whitcomb took the first hit, closing his eyes, letting it scream into him . . . He and Ranch blew smoke at each other for a while, long snakes of black lung-leavings that held together in the air like dirigibles, and then, after a while, like the
Hin denburg,
fell apart. Then Ranch ripped off his shirt, backed against a wall and sat down, his eyes going goofy and red, into zombie mode, shaking with the intensity of it; but Whitcomb began crashing around in the chair, pumping with one arm, then the other, and then both, crashing into walls, chairs, the table, singing, “Oh, Black Betty, Bam-a-Lam,” the words all screwed up, “Black Betty got fat lips, Bam-a-Lam,” the “Bam-a-Lam” punctuated by a variety of impacts as he ricocheted around the two rooms and the bathroom that he could get at.

They went back to the pipe again, and again, and again . . .

* * *

THEN LETTY called.

Ranch got the phone again, because, again, it was under his head, as he lay facedown on the beanbag chair; he had death in a corner, and was pushing on it, hard. Then the phone rang, and his life was saved.

“’Lo?”

Whitcomb, the comet, hurtled out of the kitchen and shouted, “Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you . . .”

Ranch listened for a moment, then said, “. . . this ain’t Randy . . .”

He gave Briar a peculiar look and struggled to his feet, got in front of Whitcomb and caught the chair and when Whitcomb screamed at him, he put his face an inch from Whitcomb’s and howled back, until Whitcomb stopped, and then he said, “Bitch needs to talk to you, and you needs to talk to her.”

“Yeah?” Whitcomb took the phone and said, “This is me? Who’s this?”

He listened, then looked at the phone, and then at Briar, then tossed the phone in the corner and said to Briar, “Bitch says you been talking to Davenport.”

“No,” she said, but there was a lie in her eyes, somewhere, and Whitcomb saw it.

“Don’t tell me ‘no,’ bitch, I can see you lyin’.” Whitcomb’s face was purple with rage and the crank. “Get down. Get down, bitch. Ranch, don’t let this bitch out, she been talking to the cops . . .”

They shouted at her, made her confess, though the confession didn’t make any sense, and Randy got his stick and made her get naked on her hands and knees like a dog and he beat her until she collapsed, her back red with blood, and then he said, “Ranch: fuck her in the ass, fuck her in the ass, fuck her in the ass . . .”

“Randy . . .” She was in a haze of pain and blood, and tried to crawl away and felt a foot on her back. Not Whitcomb; Whitcomb’s feet didn’t work.

“Fuck her fuck her fuck her . . .”

* * *

LETTY RODE up the hill, saw lights at the house, ditched the bike, walked across the yard past the van, and listened; and heard the screaming: “Fuck her fuck her fuck her . . . ,” ran back to her bike, down the hill and to the pay phone and she called 911.

“I think somebody’s being murdered,” she said. “I can hear the woman screaming . . .”

RANCH PULLED up his Jockey shorts and Briar crawled across the kitchen to her dress, and Whitcomb, exhausted, said, “We need to get George. Everybody in the van.”

Ranch: “George,” and he started toward the door, but missed the door and cracked his head on the doorjamb and fell down.

Whitcomb screamed, “Get up, you fuckin’ turd,” and Ranch got to his knees, and then his feet, and said, “You fuckin’ scrote,” and Whitcomb shouted at Briar, who was huddled in a corner, trying to cover herself with her dress, “Into the fuckin’ van; we find George again, into the fuckin’ van.”

Ranch was all for it; $250 in crank all gone. He hovered over Briar, his insane face a half inch from hers, howling, no words, a dog howl, and she struggled into her dress, the blood on her back seeping through the thin cotton, and Randy marched them out the back door and down the ramp.

* * *

LETTY WAS there, bouncing her bike across the yard. They didn’t see her immediately, and she climbed off and dropped the bike: Whitcomb, Briar, and Ranch looked like some kind of surrealist parade, something from a masked ball, a man in a wheelchair pumping a stick like a drum major, screaming unintelligibly, followed by Briar, hurt, staggering, bloody, and then Ranch, in his Jockey shorts, holding on to the ramp railing, barely able to walk, still howling like a dog.

Then Whitcomb saw Letty.

He hit the brakes, and Briar stumbled, and one of the chair’s wheels went off the concrete at the bottom of the ramp. And the chair tilted and Whitcomb screamed at her, and she wrenched it upright.

Whitcomb jabbed the stick at Letty and screamed, “There she is. There she is. Get her! Get her! Ranch, get her!”

Letty crossed the yard and hit the button on the switchblade and the blade flicked out. “I’m going to cut your head off,” she said to Whitcomb.

Whitcomb saw the knife and recoiled, then lifted his stick overhead with both hands and screamed at Briar, “Push me, push me,” and at Ranch, “Get her, get her,” and Ranch stumbled off the ramp and Letty turned the knife at him, and Ranch ran at her and she ducked away and he kept going in a straight line and then stumbled over his own feet and fell facedown.

Letty turned back to Whitcomb, who was screaming at Briar, “Push me, get her,” and unsatisfied with the progress, turned and slashed at Briar with the butt of his punishment stick. The butt caught her on the end of the nose and she went down, bleeding from the nose, and he screamed at her, “Get up, you bitch; you fuckin’ . . . gonna cut you a new goddamn nose . . .”

She got to her feet and Letty shouted, “Juliet, go back, go back in the house, the police are coming,” but Briar pulled the wheelchair around in a circle and Whitcomb slashed at her again and screamed, “Not that way, you cunt, not that way . . .”

She’d aimed the chair at the back of the yard. The last renters had had a bad dog which they kept staked out at the back of the house, and the dog had worn the grass down to hard dirt; and behind that was the bluff that led down into Swede Hollow.

Briar said, “I loved you, Randy,” and then she began pushing the chair toward the bluff, faster and faster, Letty calling, “Juliet, Juliet . . .” Ranch staggered to his feet and Letty turned toward him, pointing the knife at his chest, but he staggered around her, after Briar, as though he were trying to catch them—no chance of that; one of his legs was working harder than the other and he couldn’t keep going in a straight line, but tended off in circles.

Whitcomb was still trying to thrash back at Briar with his stick, and tried to brake with one hand, but Briar was stronger than he was and at the end of the yard he grabbed both wheels and shouted, “Oh, shit,” and she ran him right off the edge and Randy Whitcomb went screaming sixty miles an hour down a seventy-degree slope into a wall of trees.

He hit it with the impact of a small car driving into a brick wall. Briar stood, looking down, stunned by what she’d done. Letty came up and looked over the edge; then Ranch got there, well away from Letty, and he peered down the bluff and then said to Briar, “You fuck.”

Letty heard a siren: still a way out, but not too far. She said to Briar: “Juliet, don’t tell them I was here. Lie. Okay? Don’t tell them.”

Briar nodded dumbly, and Letty ran across the yard, folded the switchblade, climbed on her bike, bumped back across the yard, across the street, and headed down the hill. The cop car was a block over, on Seventh, as they passed, so she managed to get down the hill unseen, pedaling furiously, through the backstreets, to the Capitol. There, she stopped to turn her phone on, and found a dozen calls from home, and two more from Lucas’s cell.

* * *

 

LUCAS HAD gotten a fragmentary story from Carey, who’d been called by Weather when Letty hadn’t gotten home on time. “I don’t want her to think I’m betraying her, but I’m really worried,” Carey said. Lucas had tracked down Whitcomb’s address in a matter of a few minutes, and had broken off from the apartment surveillance.

Letty had always taken matters into her own hands, whatever the matters might be—she tended to believe that nobody could handle things quite as well as she could. Events had never proven her to be wrong. But messing with Whitcomb and one of Whitcomb’s hookers, for whatever reason—and Carey had filled him in on the reason—could be an irretrievable error.

Whitcomb was a psychotic; people who got too close to him suffered because they did not—could not—understand the sheer uncontrolled malevolence of the man. Lucas believed that Whitcomb’s condition was far beyond Whitcomb’s own control. He’d been broken at some point, perhaps at birth, perhaps as a child, but he was simply wrong, a devil’s child. There was really nothing to be done about it, other than to put him in jail forever, or kill him. Lucas thought that one or the other of those things was inevitable, a matter of time.

Now, as he rushed through the night toward Whitcomb’s place, banging down onto the interstate, then almost immediately off again at the Sixth Street exit, he saw the flashers on a St. Paul squad running parallel to him, a block over on Seventh, heading up the hill past the university. He ran the red light and turned the corner and accelerated down the block, turned onto Seventh and saw the squad make the turn over toward Whitcomb’s and he knew with a cold certainty where the squad was going.

If Whitcomb had done anything to Letty . . .

Letty had been right about that. If he’d known Whitcomb was stalking her, or anyone else in the family, Whitcomb would have died, one way or another. The problem with a psychotic was, there is no way to deflect them, once they’ve fixed on a course. You can’t talk to them, because they’re nuts.

With fear gripping his heart like an icy hand, he went after the squad.

COHN, CRUZ, AND LANE SPOTTED TWO bugout cars near the hotel, one in a skyway-level parking structure, another on the street. They all had keys in their pockets, and additional keys, in magnetic boxes, hung from under the bumpers of both vehicles. When they needed to move, they used the third vehicle, a rented Toyota Sienna minivan. Lane did most of the final scouting, because he was the unknown face, and what he said was what they wanted to hear: “You can’t believe some of the stuff they’re wearing. One woman, honest to God, she looks like she has a diamond Christmas tree hung on her. She was about a hundred years old, I could have taken it right off her neck.”

“If only they’re real,” Cohn said. They were huddled in the back of the minivan in an underground parking ramp at a medical building near St. John’s Hospital. They’d been moving since they abandoned the apartment, but the hospital turned out to be the best place to wait. People came and went at all times of the night, and sometimes sat in their cars, getting away from whatever it was that brought them to the hospital.

“There’s gonna be some paste,” Cruz told him. “But if you got it, when are you going to wear it? Tonight, the Academy Awards, maybe the number-one inaugural ball. Maybe the first big ball of the season in Palm Beach. A couple of other times, but tonight, for sure.”

“Surprised the insurance company lets them wear it,” Cohn said. He was looking sleepy, yawning, like he always did before a job. “For a thousand bucks, they could make a replica that nobody could tell but a jeweler.”

“If you got robbed, it’d be almost as big an embarrassment to admit that you were wearing fakes, as losing the real thing,” Cruz said. “Some of these people—not so much the Republicans as the Democrats, really—have so much money that they really don’t care. They’ve got so much money that if they lost a five-million-dollar stone, they’d say, ‘So what? There’s more where that came from.’”

“So why didn’t we hold up the Democrats?” Lane asked.

“Because I didn’t have the inside information on the Democrats,” Cruz said. “When the moneymen would be there. And they didn’t have a ball like this one, when all the big money was in one spot. They were more scattered around, movie stars in one place, hedge funds in another.”

“I didn’t know the Democrats had so much money,” Lane said.

“An ocean of money,” Cohn said. “Both of them, Republicans and Democrats. That’s all that counts anymore.”

“You think we’ll elect a colored guy as president?” Lane asked Cruz.

“I hope so,” she said. “I’m tired of all the racist bullshit that goes on. Maybe this will settle it.”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure that colored people are ready,” Lane said.

“What are you talking about, Jesse?” Cruz asked, with some heat. “Tate was a good friend of yours. You hung out even when you didn’t have to.”